What Have We Done to Us? Abraham and Teshuva

Thoughts for the Days of Repentance

This is an expanded and revised version of the talk I gave at Kehillat Yedidya on the first night of Rosh Hashanah.

“Then Avimelech summoned Abraham and said to him, “What have you seen to do to us? What wrong have I done that you should bring so great a guilt upon me and my kingdom? You have done to me things that ought not to be done” (Genesis 20:9)

Abraham stands at the center of the Torah readings for Rosh Hashana, the holiday that begins the Ten Days of Repentance. On the first day we read the story of his expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael from his and Sarah’s home. On the second day, we read the story that follows, the binding of Isaac. Both stories raise questions about Abraham’s behavior and the possibility that, in his determination to do God’s will, he also sins. But we do not think of Abraham as an exemplar of repentance, teshuva. The reason is obvious—Abraham sins, but his response is not to cry out to God, to fast, and to lie on the ground, as King David does.

Perhaps teshuva was difficult for him. All of us find plenty of arguments and excuses to evade it. And is it really a duty of ours? After all, there is no explicit Torah command to repent our sins.

Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein z”l explained that teshuva consists entirely of a person’s movement toward God as an act of free will. The first and fundamental stage in teshuva is that we, as human beings who can choose between good and evil, recognize that we need to repent. We must repent our transgressions not because the Torah tells us to, but because it is a consequence of the Torah in its entirety. If we take this view, then teshuva is not a positive precept, not a command we must obey. Rather, it is a practice above and beyond the letter of the law, a stringency we impose on ourselves. And it’s tough to be tough on oneself.

We can understand the Rosh Hashana Torah readings in this spirit. Here, as in all the other stories about him, in Genesis and in the extra-biblical stories about him, he is the archetype of the person who acts above and beyond God’s commands. Rashi, in his commentary at the beginning of the story of Noah (Genesis 6:9), distinguishes between Noah and Abraham: “‘Noah walked with God’: In the case of Avraham Scripture says, ‘[God] before whom I walked’ [Genesis 24:40]; Noah needed God’s support to uphold him in righteousness, Avraham drew his moral strength from himself and walked in his righteousness by his own effort.”

Noah is a righteous man, but a passive one. He is righteous because he walked with God. He is also a loner. He is righteous on his own, but he does not save others. Abraham, in contrast, does not walk alongside God, does not wait for him. He rushes ahead, he initiates, he charges forward against his enemies, above and beyond what God enjoins him to do. And therefore, inevitably, he also stumbles and errs and fails. In the story of the expulsion of Hagar, he obeys God’s injunction to comply with Sarah’s demand to expel her, and the son she bore to Abraham, in violation of his own moral instinct. He is obedient to God, but he sins, as Nachmanides states (on Genesis 16:6): “‘And Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from before her face.’ Our mother did transgress by this affliction, and Abraham also by his permitting her to do so.” Abraham acts, and he sins. Unlike Noah, he must repent. Noah worships God out of fear and reverence, and does not sin. Abraham worships God out of love, his heart yearns for God, and this creates the place where sin is not only possible but inevitable.

What is the nature of the teshuva that Abraham needs to do? I suggest that he must repent not only the sins he committed, but also his attempts to justify what he did on the grounds that he was simply doing God’s will, or what the circumstances required.

When he sets out to bind and sacrifice his son Isaac, he does so in obedience to God’s command, and does so forthwith. And how strongly this deed of his resonates in this time of war, when we, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, send our loved ones to the front and into mortal danger. Jews through the ages have identified with Abraham’s heroism in his obedience to God’s command. Yet the story is unsettling—especially in its context in Genesis, soon after Abraham’s extended negotiation with God to save Sodom. In the binding of Isaac, Abraham seems to act like Noah—he accepts the divine decree, does not argue, makes no effort to understand. Perhaps thinks there is no point in trying. After all, despite all his efforts, he failed to save Sodom. But at least he tried. Even if the command to sacrifice Isaac remained in force, he would have set out on his awful journey knowing that he had done all he could to change or temper it.

The same is true when he went down to Egypt, and later to Gerar, in the interim between the story of Sodom and the journey to Mt. Moriah, when he was so frightened that he handed Sarah over to the local ruler, and in doing so not only sinned against his wife but also nearly implicated them and their people in a great sin.

There is no indication in Genesis that Abraham engaged in teshuva. But there is something important about the example Abraham sets, an essential stage on the way to King David. Abraham fails and makes mistakes, but he continues to act in the world, to make decisions, to be tested, even as he knows that at each parting of ways, when he must decide between different possibilities, he is liable to sin. This is the first step toward teshuva, the knowledge that we must act and exercise our free will, even as we know that there is no way to act without sinning.

Before the holiday I participated in a study evening in memory of Hayim Katsman z”l, who fell on October 7 as he saved the lives of others. The evening was led by his mother, Hannah, a member of our community. The subject was differences of opinion, mahloket. One of the texts we discussed is comes from a list of the disagreements between the schools of the sages Hillel and Shammai (Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 13b):

For two and a half years the house of Shammai and the house of Hillel argued. These said: Better for man never to have been created than to have been created. And these said: Better for man to have been created that not to have been created. They counted and decided: Better for man never to have been created than to have been created. Now that he has been created, he should rummage through his actions.

The need to rummage through one’s actions is a consequence of being created by God. And what is rummaging? If our sins are apparent to us, we hardly need to rummage to find them. To rummage is thrust our arms into the pile of our actions and turn them over and over, to search precisely in those places that we think we have already cleaned, ordered, gotten rid of all the crumbs and dirt—because it is precisely in those places that we will find the thing that we really need to repent.

We have been through a very hard year. We were the victims of brutal attacks but we were not passive. We acted. Our soldiers, in defense of the country and themselves, were compelled to kill. But we must take care. Most Israelis feel that justice is on our side, that we acted as we must act, that at every stage and every moment we had no other choice. But the fact that we were attacked and that we are fighting to defend our homes does not mean that every action is permissible. Every human being is created in the image of God. The blood of every human being we have killed above and beyond what was absolutely necessary for self defense is on our hands.

The teshuva that we engage in this week, this year, is a difficult task, perhaps one that we do not yet have the capacity to do. But, at the very least, we can recognize that we are the progeny of Abraham and Sarah, acting in the world and doing much good, but also sinning. The question that Avimelech asked Abraham in the land of the Philistines needs to ring in our ears today: “What have you seen to do to us? … You have done to me things that ought not to be done”